The woman three doors down from me is a former teacher, and not a very good one at that. She is a far-right-wing bigot, who believes in parents' rights, but only where it suits her.

I am reminded of my own schooldays, and how, when the clock wound around to 3pm, and the teacher was telling the class it was time to pack up, they would look and see one student who was sitting quietly at their desk with the books that they needed for their homework piled up on their desk and say, "So and so's got a nice home to go to," yet someone else was fooling around and the teacher would make the opposite comment.

I remember one day, a kid in my class, who a friend said had been "his best mate and his worst enemy" was in math, and my math teacher wasn't a man renowned for tact, said of this kid, "So, now he's finally opened his book to see where we are. Keep switched on!" And this kid's parents were separating. So, the poor kid was probably thinking about the fight his parents had the night before. As much as many of us could have been understanding if his home life had been, after his parents separated, that he was living with Mum and he'd rather be living with Dad, or it was, "Get home from school, let younger siblings in, get them a snack, supervise their homework and start his own, see to it that the siblings are bathed, and have to make a start of preparing dinner, and then mum came home," when he would rather have gone out on his bike to his friend's place, or gone skateboarding and done his homework in the evening, and then watched TV, his cruelty to others was directed at the wrong people. And I remember my Year 12 English Teacher saying that he'd lost it with a kid who hadn't done their homework for over a month, and the kid has broken down in tears and he's felt terrible and asked why, and the kid wails, "My father has left us and my mother's sick," and he's thought, "Homework?! That was probably the last thing on the kid's mind. They probably had to worry about getting enough to eat for themselves and their siblings!"

Teachers need to be perceptive and intuitive and think, "Okay, if this kid is misbehaving in class, is there something going on at home?" And if a kid is LGBTIQA, and the parents don't know, it's probably not a good idea to tell them. And if a student trusts a teacher but not their parents, it's a betrayal of trust to tell the parents. I had a teacher who cared about me when I was in Year Eight, and she had no time for the bullies. Why? I was able to confide in her, whereas the other kids wouldn't.